Your friends are about to become unwilling stars of the most absurd mobile game Nintendo has ever shipped.
Nintendo has announced Pictonico!, a new mobile game co-developed with Intelligent Systems (the studio behind the WarioWare series) that pulls real faces from your photo gallery and throws them into rapid-fire minigames. It launches May 28 on both iOS and Android.
WarioWare meets your camera roll
The concept is immediately familiar to anyone who played WarioWare. Short, chaotic minigames. Weird prompts. No time to think. The key difference here is that Pictonico! swaps out Nintendo's signature cartoon characters and replaces them with actual human faces pulled from your photos.
That means your mum, your coworker, your dog (if your dog has a face, which it does), or whoever you snapped a photo of recently could end up getting launched, squished, or otherwise subjected to something deeply undignified. You can use a fresh selfie taken in the moment or grab any existing picture from your gallery.
The WarioWare DNA makes sense given Intelligent Systems is directly involved. That studio has been behind the WarioWare series for over two decades, and the minigame structure in Pictonico! looks very much like their work translated to a photo-based format.
80 minigames, multiple ways to play
At launch, Pictonico! ships with 80 minigames. That's a solid number for a mobile title, and Nintendo has confirmed several distinct modes to keep things from going stale:
- A stage-based progression mode for structured play
- Score Attack challenges with increasing difficulty
- A high speed mode for players who want things even more hectic
- A sudden death challenge for the truly masochistic
Here's the thing about the pricing model: Nintendo is calling Pictonico! "free-to-start," which sounds like a subscription trap but actually isn't. Free play is limited to a handful of minigames. The full content unlocks as two separate one-time purchases: Volume 1 costs $8 and Volume 2 costs $6. No subscriptions, no battle passes, no rotating storefronts. Just buy it and own it.
For a mobile game in 2026, that's genuinely refreshing.
Pictonico! is available on Google Play and the App Store. Volume 1 ($8) and Volume 2 ($6) are sold as permanent one-time purchases with no subscription required.
Before Pictonico: what came before this idea
This isn't the first time Nintendo has played with the concept of putting real faces into games. The 3DS had Face Raiders, a camera-based AR shooter that stuck your face on balloon enemies. It was a launch gimmick more than a game, but it showed Nintendo's long-running interest in blending real-world photos with gameplay.
Pictonico! feels like a more fully realized version of that idea. Where Face Raiders was a tech demo dressed as a game, Pictonico! is built around the minigame format from the ground up, with the photo element as a personalization layer rather than the entire hook.
What most players miss when they see "selfie game" is that the minigames themselves have to be worth playing on their own. With Intelligent Systems involved and 80 minigames at launch, there's actual substance here beyond the novelty of seeing your face on screen.
For more on what's worth playing on mobile and beyond, check out our game reviews and gaming guides to stay across the latest releases.
Pictonico! hits iOS and Android on May 28. Mark the date if you've ever wanted to see your best friend's face get launched out of a cannon.
